Howdy folks, I have great news to share with you today! Gartner released their 2017 Magic Quadrant for Access Management (AM MQ), which shows that Microsoft is placed in the leaders quadrant for our completeness of vision and ability to execute. The AM MQ is a new MQ. It is a separate entity from the...

Howdy folks, Today I’ve got a new batch of data to share that I hope many of you will find interesting and useful. Those of you who follow the blog know that Azure AD works well with a ton of applications and that our app gallery features over 2,800 pre-integrated third-party apps. (Third-party meaning apps...

Howdy folks, Today I am thrilled to share the news that Ping Identity and Microsoft are partnering to provide secure access to on-premises web applications through the Azure AD Application Proxy and PingAccess. This partnership will expand the reach of Azure AD for customers and is a key proof point of our vision that “Identity...

Three years ago I was asked the same question pretty frequently – by both customers and media. At the time, it was a legitimate question, but today it comes up very rarely. The question was: “Is Microsoft committed to supporting the Apple and Google platforms?” The frequency of that question changed dramatically on March 27,...

Howdy folks, Catching up on some news your may have not been aware of with today’s post. Azure AD the leader in KuppingerCole leadership compass report First, I’m excited to let you know that we were recently cited as the leader in the Cloud User and Access Management market by European analyst firm KuppingerCole. KuppingerCole...

Howdy folks, Next up in our news for TechEd Europe are two cool new capabilities in our app access panel. One of the things many of our larger customers care about is providing a customized employee experience when accessing and signing into SaaS applications. Previously I wrote about how you can customize the text and...

Recent Posts from EMS Leaders

Howdy folks, One of the coolest collaboration features in Office 365 is Office 365 groups. Your employees can create these groups on the fly and use them to collaborate with their co-workers on projects, sharing team documents, emails and calendars. These groups are easy and fast to create and judging by their usage telemetry, they are VERY popular. However as the number of Office 365 groups increases, it can create a bit of a mess, for instance when a project is completed but the group is still hanging around. To help address that issue, we’ve just turned on the public preview of Office 365 groups expiration! With this new feature you can set an expiration timeframe for any Office 365 group you choose. Once that timeframe is set, owners of any groups set to expire will be asked to renew them if they still need them. Groups that aren’t renewed will be deleted. And using a feature we shipped earlier called “Soft-delete of groups”, any group that was not meant to be deleted can be restored within 30 days by the group owners.... Read more

One of the most impactful changes we have made at Microsoft is to focus our engineering teams solely on usage and the customer experience of our services . In all my years leading product teams, I have never seen something that has impacted the culture of an engineering organization more than this. These changes have been so incredibly positive that I want to share the details of what we did to make this happen. I have two reasons for doing this: 1) I know that many of you are interested in driving cultural change within your own teams and organizations – and, perhaps, the work we’ve done may spark some ideas for you. 2) It may be helpful for our customers and partners to understand how we prioritize our work.... Read more

Organizations are pushing forward in their digital transformations and we continue to see and hear more about what this shift means for IT. The scope of digital transformation goes beyond moving existing work to the cloud and enabling a more mobile workforce. It brings the opportunity to reimagine business from the ground up – from product offerings, to customer engagement strategies, to how to drive innovation and differentiate vs. competition. As a result, today more than ever, CIOs are being asked by their boards and other executives to weigh in on a growing number of business decisions. Almost half (46%) of CIOs in the State of the CIO survey report directly to their CEO, 61% have direct interaction with the board, and 76% are interfacing directly with customers.... Read more

Something I have come to really appreciate as we’ve built Intune and watched its usage scale to millions of devices is the unbelievably broad and diverse types of hardware our customers have to manage. To put this challenge in perspective, check out the chart below. In this chart, you can see the diversity of devices facing an Intune customer. Each box represents a specific device model (iPhone 6, Galaxy 6, etc.), and the size of the box indicates the percentage of that device in the overall population. The customer (who will remain anonymous) shown in this example is managing more than 40k devices with Intune and they have a very open/broad BYOD policy. It’s also interesting to note that they are currently using many of the Enterprise Mobility + Security capabilities in conjunction with Office 365 and the Office mobile apps on their devices.... Read more

Hi everyone, and welcome to an important post for those of you who have been using the document tracking and revocation feature. We received feedback from some of you around privacy and compliance when using this feature and we’ve tried to address that with this release. We are excited to release in preview the new ‘Do not track’ feature which gives organizations flexibility to configure a group of users within their company who should not be tracked because of privacy or compliance reasons. You can now configure ‘Do not track’ for users by adding them to a mail enabled group email address from Azure AD (can be a cloud native or sync group). Once configured, you will no longer be able to track activities of users of this group. Admins can configure the feature for specific groups by running new PowerShell commands added to the admin tool.... Read more